Or Hen
Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Poland
Biography
"Or Hen grew up in Moshav Even-Sapir, in the countryside of Jerusalem, Israel. He received his undergraduate degree in physics and computer engineering from the Hebrew University and earned his PhD in experimental physics at Tel-Aviv University. Before joining the MIT physics faculty in July 2017, Hen was an MIT Pappalardo Fellow in Physics from 2015-2017. Hen has received various prizes and fellowships for his work to date, including the Fermi Lab Intensity-Frontier fellowship, Rothschild Fellowship, Jefferson Science Association and Israeli Physics Society thesis prizes, A. Pazi Award of the Israeli Council for Higher Education and the Y. Eisenberg Prize of Tel-Aviv University."
Research Interest
"Professor Hen’s research focuses on studies of QCD effects in the nuclear medium, and the interplay between partonic and nucleonic degrees of freedom in nuclei. Specifically, Hen uses high-energy electron, neutrino, photon, and proton scattering off atomic nuclei to study Short-Range Correlations (SRCs): Temporal fluctuations of high-density, high-momentum, nucleon clusters in nuclei. These pairs account for almost all high-momentum (k>k_F) nucleon in nuclei, constitute 20-25% of the nuclear wave-function, and are a leading candidate for non-nucleonic configurations in nuclei. Hen and collaborators conducted experiments at the US based Thomas-Jefferson and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratories, as well as other accelerators around the world, where they study the structure and characteristics of SRC pairs and examined their effect on various topics in nuclear, particle, atomic and astrophysics. For example, in a recent series of publications Hen and collaborators have shown that SRCs in atomic nuclei are predominantly neutron-proton pairs and demonstrated its significant implications to quark distributions in nuclei (the ""EMC effect""); the free (un-bound) neutron structure; generalization of effective theories for two-component Fermi-gases to atomic nuclei, the nuclear symmetry energy and neutron stars structure; and more."
